this paper. We also thank the following for permission to reproduce images of their products: Consumer Value Stores, Disney Enterprises, Inc., International Home Foods, Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Lehigh Valley Farms, Mott's Consumer Services, Neutrogena Corporation, Playtex Products Inc., The Procter & Gamble Company, Rite Aid Corporation, Rubber Maid Incorporated, Spring Tree Corporation, and Unilever United States, Inc. Address correspondence and reprint requests to either Barbara Malt, Department of Psychology, 17 Memorial Drive East, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015 (e-mail: bcm@lehigh.edu) or Steven Sloman, Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Box 1978, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 (e-mail: Steven_Sloman@brown.edu)

Various revisions of the Berlin and Kay (1969) model of the evolution of basic color term systems have been produced in the last thirty years, motivated by both empirical and theoretical considerations. On the empirical side, new facts about color naming systems have continually come to light, which have demanded adjustments in the descriptive model. On the theoretical side, there has been a sustained effort to find motivation in the vision science literature regarding color appearance for the synchronic and diachronic constraints observed to govern color terminology systems. The present paper continues the pursuit of both of these goals. A new empirical question is addressed with data from the World Color Survey (WCS) and a revised model is proposed, which both responds to recently raised empirical questions and provides new motivation from the field of color vision for the observed constraints on color naming. Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons...

conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Simon, until nearly the end of the 20 century, essentially embraced Piaget's position of extreme formalism and content independence of inferential rules. Cognitive scientists' endorsement of the formalist, universalistic position was undoubtedly encouraged by the analogy between the human mind and the computer: brain = hardware, cognitive procedures = operating principles and factory-installed software (Block, 1995). This analogy both encouraged the universality assumption and discouraged any assumption that cognitive procedures might be alterable. The heuristics and biases movement of Kahneman and Tversky (1974) and their colleagues in social

Abstract. This paper describes categories for landscape elements in the language of the Yindjibarndi people, a community of Indigenous Australians. Yindjibarndi terms for topographic features were obtained from dictionaries, and augmented and refined through discussions with local language experts in the Yindjibarndi community. In this paper, the Yindjibarndi terms for convex landforms and for water bodies are compared to English-language terms used to describe the Australian landscape, both in general terms and in the AUSLIG Gazetteer. The investigation found fundamental differences between the two conceptual systems at the basic level, supporting the notion that people from different places and cultures may use different categories for geographic features.

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one.

Rather than having universal linguistic categories for some sets of common objects, languages develop their own, idiosyncratic naming patterns for them. Accounting for these patterns requires reference not only to the understanding of stimulus properties by individual speakers of a language, but also to the linguistic and cultural histories of the language they speak. To better understand how these two sources of influence work together to produce linguistic categories, we examined the relations among linguistic categories for 60 common containers for speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese. We discriminated among several possibilities that imply different relative contributions of the two sources of influence. No single type of relation dominated; the contributions of the two influences varied across different parts of this single domain. We suggest an interaction that is constrained by structure in the stimulus space.

Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Interdisciplinary Studies-Ph.D.

A strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis is that the influence of language on thought is obligatory or at least habitual; that is, thought is always, or under most circumstances, guided by language. We argue, in contrast, that at the lexical level, language and thought need not closely or commonly mirror each other. Naming -- of objects, events, or other entities -- is a communicative process that is sensitive to pressures such as a language's history and the particular history of speaker and addressee. These influences are not relevant to a non-linguistic conceptual system and to the various processes that may draw on it. We suggest that, as a result, the categories defined by the names given to entities and those defined by purely conceptual clusters may diverge. We present results indicating that linguistic categories (sets of objects called by the same name) are not isomorphic to groupings emerging from a conceptual task for artifacts in the domain of containers. We found that the linguistic categories for 60 common containers varied across speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese. In contrast, the ways that speakers clustered the objects by similarity were substantially the same. We also present results indicating that verbs of motion show a similar pattern when encoding of actions is non-linguistic. Speakers of English and Spanish showed the same pattern of similarity judgments and confusions in memory for previously viewed action clips despite different naming patterns in their languages. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to language-specific patterns. Results from these two studies, along with consideration of the nature of naming and non-linguistic conceptual tasks, suggest that (1) all do...

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II. What is indigenous knowledge? 1 III. Why is indigenous knowledge important? 3